Should I Be Social Media Cross-Posting?

Businesses can often fall into one of two traps when it comes to social media, either they don’t quite understand the value of creating organic posts, limiting what they post across their channels because they ‘don’t have enough time’, or they overdo it, which can mean they serve their audiences with useless information that doesn’t have a purpose. That’s not to say all businesses fit into one of those categories; some get it right, and that’s because they understand how cross-posting works and what you should and shouldn’t be doing when it comes to your social media.

What Is Social Media Cross-Posting?

Cross-posting is where you create one post and share it across all platforms. Sure, this might sound like a quick and easy strategy for social media; not only do you save time in the creative production of developing copy and images for each channel, but you also save on input time, as we all know copy and pasting isn’t exactly very time-consuming. Easy, right? Well, while cross-posting is definitely a useful strategy, it does also have its cons.

Getting It Wrong

If you asked everyone you meet which social media channels they use, you will find the same names crop up over and over again (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram etc) but the reality is, everyone uses different channels for different things and certain channels might not be relevant to your business. They may have a Facebook account purely to interact with friends and family, LinkedIn to network professionally and Instagram to showcase a hobby; each channel can be used in different ways which means users expect a unique experience from each platform. When you see it this way, it therefore makes sense that each social media channel may be used at different times of the day, so cross-posting at one time across all channels isn’t going to reach peak audiences. This also goes hand-in-hand with how often you post, as audiences expect more or less content depending on the platform they are visiting; posts on LinkedIn tend to stick around a lot longer, so once or twice a week works fine, but on Twitter, people expect to see daily posts as they can otherwise get lost amongst the amount of content put out there.

The other issue with cross-posting is channel-specific language. We all know we can associate ‘retweet’ with Twitter and reactions with Facebook, so if one post is shared across all platforms, it would need to be generic or risk confusing audiences and coming across as lazy.

The type of content is also important. You might post a lengthy article-sized post on LinkedIn that just wouldn’t work on Instagram. When you do this, your customers will recognise that something isn’t quite right and quickly start to get fed up of your content, meaning you’ll have less engagement and less conversions.

Getting Social Media Right

In general, cross-posting isn’t all bad. When you don’t have a designated team for social media marketing, it can be difficult to add this to your current workload, which is why cross-posting can be beneficial. Every business should have a social media strategy, so it’s important you do have a presence online and continue to create organic posts. If you need help producing content, this can be where hiring a digital agency can be beneficial. For more information, contact us here and we can talk through your requirements.